


Terrified

by soldierwitch



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: F/M, Liz Ortecho POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-10
Updated: 2019-02-10
Packaged: 2019-10-25 22:36:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17733947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soldierwitch/pseuds/soldierwitch
Summary: Takes place after Max leaves the diner in 1x04. Liz reflects on what it is that terrifies her about him, herself, and the lies surrounding Rosa's death.





	Terrified

**Author's Note:**

> This was interesting to write and my first foray into Liz Ortecho's point of view. I enjoyed myself. It's nice working out narrative voices for characters I'm just beginning to learn about and fall in love with. Hope y'all enjoy!

Standing in the dim light of her father’s diner, Liz feels as bereft as the girls she used to read about in her youth. She is not a teenager, her life is not a series of events that eventually work themselves out in her favor, and she has never believed love is worth throwing away everything she’s ever known and cherished. And yet here she stands feeling her heart beating against the bars of its cage as it processes Max walking away from her for the second night in a row. 

Tears swam in his eyes like the last time as if her words had been knives stabbing into his heart. As if the injured party in all of this is somehow him. As if he hasn’t carried around a lie involving her sister for the better part of a decade. There was a time where she thought she knew him. Max was the kind of boy who lived his life in the background of other people’s lives. A shadow of sorts, someone always in the periphery of whatever was going on but never at the center of attention. She’d like that about him. He was always where you thought he would be. A presence so constant that until he’d showed her his own memories, she had no idea when they had met only that he’d been around for as long as she could remember. 

Now Liz feels like she’d never known him at all, and she was foolish to think that knowing his favorite author and his dream of becoming a writer meant she knew him. Those were scraps. The kind of information people learn over time about someone, but they’re not the same thing as knowing that person, they can’t be. If they were then the boy who was her lab partner, the boy who made her smile and laugh even when she didn’t think she could, wouldn’t be the man who is hiding things from her now. This isn’t a matter of 10 years passing and changing them because this lie is too old. Max sat on this through Rosa’s funeral, through her tears, through her rage, and through the town’s vitriol and violence toward her family. 

Liz thought her sister had lit herself up like a Roman candle and sparked until she fizzled out bringing two innocent girls with her on the way down. But that’s not what happened. Her sister’s light was snuffed out. Max knew that and he let her break in front of him anyway. She’d become the kind of person she never wanted to be. The kind of person someone else has to wait on because they are always walking out. A person who can’t commit because she can’t connect. For ten years, Liz had blamed Rosa and her speeches on cages and distance for her transformation. Now she can’t help but believe her sister was right. People lie. They tell you that they love you and still they destroy your world. That’s what Max Evans is...a destroyer of worlds. 

Max has burned through every good memory Liz has of him and yet when he backed away from her, she took a step forward. And when he walked out, she watched until she could no longer see him. When Liz said she was terrified she did mean terrified of him but not in the way he thought. She’s terrified of her own heart; it nearly walked out the door with him despite everything he is keeping from her. Liz is terrified of what that says about her. She is a woman of science and bias finds its way into many things, but she thought she would be biased against him not toward him. There’s a part of her fighting to exonerate him. Every clue is a chance to prove him innocent. 

Today she was willing to believe Kyle’s father was the person Rosa was seeing. A man more than twice her age who’d known her since she was in pigtails. Somehow it seemed like the easier pill to swallow. The kind of pill that fit a narrative that didn’t involve Max. Rosa was angry and she was an addict. She’d have done anything for a fix. Drugs or people it didn’t matter as long as she got to forget, to escape from herself and her demons. But in trying to absolve Max, she’d condemned Mr. Valenti. He’d been nothing but kind to her and her family, and she had stood in front of his son and created a world in which he was the type of man who would take advantage of a lost and broken girl. She’d retracted what she said but the damage was done. There’s a door now in Kyle’s mind, one that leads to the possibility of his father being dishonorable. Of being one of the worst kinds of men, a deceiver and an opportunist. That door is one of her own creation and while she feels safe with Kyle, it’s possible that he shouldn’t feel safe with her.

“I am my mother’s daughter,” Liz says. There is no one to hear her but still the words are softly spoken. She’d left Roswell because being here had been too much that’s why her mother had ran. It’s why Rosa had ran, too, ran right into trouble. Liz had been so scared of following in their footsteps that she hadn’t realize she already has. Roswell didn’t fade in the dust of her tires 10 years ago. If it had, she would have been able to settle and find a place of her own. A place Rosa had never been with people whose lives she had never touched. 

Liz ran because the Ortecho women are runners. She doesn’t know if it’s been bred into her by circumstance or if it’s simply in her DNA. But she does know that it was bad memories and heartbreak that put Roswell in her rearview. Rosa was everywhere back then. She was laughing in the diner, smiling on the street, and arguing with her in her room. She was yelling, and she was sneaking out of windows. Rosa was disappearing behind doors, high in alleyways, and dancing through crosswalks. She'd see her in the mirror, and laid across her bed. There was no part of Roswell that Rosa didn’t occupy.

At the time leaving felt necessary. It didn’t matter what her heart wanted because Rosa had been her heart and she was gone. And it’s the same now. The difference is that Liz is planting her feet. She will not run. The ground may continue shifting beneath her and what she knows may continue to be challenged at every turn, but she will not leave. Not until she has answers, not until she discovers the truth no matter how many worlds it destroys.

  
_ Max Evans isn’t the only one who can be a destroyer of worlds _ , Liz thinks as she heads up to her room.  _ And that’s most terrifying thing of all. _

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Feedback is always appreciated. If you'd like to drop me a line or a prompt, you can find me over on tumblr @asoldierwitch.


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